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“Did you get everything you needed?”
“And then some,” I say, and I climb into the back seat and set the bag between my feet, and pull the door shut. The handcuffs clink against each other through the paper, and I shift the bag slightly so the sound is muffled. “Can you step on it? My boyfriend’s been waiting.”
He looks at me in the rearview mirror with the expression of a man who has ferried me to a closed hardware store and then to a sex shop at half past midnight and has arrived, finally, at a kind of peaceful acceptance of all of it.
“Sure thing,” he says, and pulls out of the parking lot.
I rest my head against the window again and watch Ironwood Falls slide past in its late-night version of itself — the closed storefronts, the orange puddles of streetlight on wet asphalt, the occasional lit window suggesting someone else in this town is also awake at this hour making decisions of questionable quality. The rain has started up, the fine, persistent kind that doesn’t announce itself, just settles softly into life.
Smiling, I slip my hand around the handle of the whip.
New life, new June.
And if my ex-boyfriend gives me any shit, I’ll whip him in the dick.
Chapter Five
Wraith
It feels like sandpaper sliding over half-dried Jell-O as my eyelids peel open. Moaning, I sit up and try to reach for the back of my head only to feel my movements held up by torn towels and ripped blankets.
Fuck, still tied up.
Not just tied up, but she re-did the knots.
I’m alone, except for the frosted-tipped fiend on the TV screen — why the fuck did she leave that thing on? Was it to torture me? — and I set to work, twisting and stretching and pulling and tearing, working at the fabric bit by bit, while my muscles scream, my head pounds, and blood drips down the back of my neck.
It takes me the better part of what feels like an hour, though it’s probably closer to fifteen minutes, because I have nothing to measure time by except Guy Fieri’s increasingly unhinged tour of American excess and my mounting, humiliated fury.
The dish towel goes first. I get my thumb folded in at the right angle, create the slack I need, and work it with patient, grinding persistence until the knot gives and my wrists come apart with a dull throb of protest from my shoulders. Then the bath towel connecting my left hand to the radiator, which takes longer because she’s actually threaded it twice around the pipe and tied it off with something I don’t immediately recognize and then do — it’s a cleat hitch, the kind you’d use to tie off a boat — and I have to stop and stare at it for a moment because what the hell, June, where did you learn a cleat hitch?
But I work it out and get one hand fully free.
I sit against the radiator with my wrists unbound, my left hand free, and my ankles still roped together, and I press the back of my hand against the back of my skull and examine the result. Dark. Not as much as I’d expected, which means the bleeding’s slowed, which means I probably don’t have a skull fracture, which is the kind of optimistic assessment you make when you’re sitting on the floor of your ex-girlfriend’s apartment at god-knows-what-hour with a lamp-shaped grudge forming on your head.
On the TV, Guy is in Florida, wrestling with an alligator for a hoagie roll.
Then there’s a click, and the door opens, and June enters carrying a bag with the words “The Love Hole” emblazoned on it. Something thick, rubbery, and dark protrudes menacingly out of the top of the bag.
“What the fuck?” We say in unison.
I think I have a better reason to ask. All she’s seeing is me trying to get free from her improvised bondage. Me? I feel my asshole pucker just thinking about the contents of her bag.
“You need to fucking stop, Dylan,” she says.
My answer is not to answer, not to ask questions, and just reach for the knots around my right hand and start tugging. I work it free while she reaches into her bag and pulls out a whip that looks like it belongs in the hands of a six-hundred-dollars-an-hour dominatrix.
“Why the fuck do you just keep fucking up my life? Why the fuck did you have to come back?” She says as she drops the bag and advances on me, holding the whip high. “I swear, I hate you so fucking much. All you do is fuck things up. So guess what? I’m going to fuck you up. I’m going to whip you in the goddamn cock.”
“June, just hold on a second.”
“Don’t.” She snaps the whip, and it cracks against the floor six inches from my left knee with a sound like a gunshot, and I flinch. I actually flinch. Me. A man who has been shot at, stabbed, and had a tire iron introduced to his face in a parking lot in Reno, flinching at a sex-shop whip wielded by a five-foot-two woman in sleep shorts.
“June, put that down.”
“Why?” She snaps it again, closer this time, and the tip catches my shin and I hiss through my teeth because that fucking stings, it genuinely stings, and she sees it stings and something in her face goes harder and sharper and she raises it again. “Why should I put it down? Give me one fucking reason.”
“Because I’m trying to help you,” I say, and I hate how it comes out — raw, stripped of the calm I’ve been trying to maintain, with something underneath it I don’t want her to hear. Something I don’t want to admit exists. “That’s the only reason I’m here. There’s no other reason.”
